About

$15,399

428

Discovered this after the Kickstarter finished? You can pre-order the book here.

Stretch goals:

$15,000: Hardback book - achieved!

$20,000: Embossing and a dust cover.

"Decrypting Rita is that rarest and most refreshing of things: a science–fiction story that feels like it comes from the future."

- Phil Foglio

"Deliriously confusing and addictive... It’s kind of wonderful."

- Peter Watts

"Seriously folks, if you haven't looked at Decrypting Rita yet you really ought to. Innovative, fresh, interesting, and it does my head in."

- Charlie Stross

"Decrypting Rita is a singular vision for what comics can be."

- Comics Alliance

The fastest woman ever built has been dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend. She's got to pull herself together across four parallel worlds before a hive-mind can take over the planet.

All of these worlds progress across the page simultaneously, color-coded for easy reading.

After four and a half years of work, I've finally finished this graphic novel. Now it's time to publish the final volume - and the deluxe omnibus, as well.

Yes, two books at once. Why? Well, I had small print runs of volumes 1 and 2, and don't have enough to offer the whole set to new fans without doing a new print run. Economies of scale mean that a thousand copies of the omnibus is going to cost me (and you!) a lot less than a few hundred copies apiece of all three books.

Volume 3 will be a 5.5x8.5" book, just like the first two volumes. Full color, with spot gloss throughout, for that extra touch of magic. The omnibus, on the other hand? It's going to be 16.5x8.5", opening to almost three feet wide so you can see the same grand horizontal sweep of the story that you can see online. If this campaign goes past my stretch goals it'll be a hardback book, with some embossed imagery on the cover. I'm pretty excited about getting to indulge my fetish for Cool Printing Processes here!

You can check out the whole story online for free here. And if you don't want another book to haul around, you can grab the PDF tier, and maybe start supporting me on Patreon.

About Me

I'm Margaret Trauth, and I make comics. I was born in New Orleans in 1972, and spent the latter half of my twenties in the Hollywood animation industry. I escaped with my sanity intact, and currently live in Seattle.

REWARDS

Everyone who pledges ten bucks or more will get PDFs of all three volumes, and of the omnibus. Read them, pass them to your friends, use them as covers for steganographic messages.

For those folks who've been supporting me since the beginning, $25 will get you a copy of book 3 that will match books 1 and 2 on your shelf and give you that nice satisfying feeling of owning the whole set. It's a 5.5x8.5" softcover, just like the first two.

If you're new to this comic, or have been holding out for the whole story to be finished, this is for you. It's a 16.5x8.5" softcover, with spot gloss throughout the whole thing, and should look pretty magnificent on your coffee table or your shelf.

For those of you who've been following since the beginning and want to both satisfy your OCD about having incomplete series on your shelf and have the omnibus, I'm offering a discount for both of them.

Do you run a comic shop? Then this may be for you. Five copies of the omnibus for you to put on your shelves and sell at the price on the back of the book.

For a hundred bucks or more, you can get your choice of book 3 and/or the omnibus with a drawing in the back, and your name listed as a sponsor!

For $150 or more, you get a drawing in your choice of book 3 and/or the omnibus, and a picture of you in the comic's style above your name. You'll also get some copies of that image in various sizes suitable for use in social media.

And finally, $300 gets you exactly the same thing as the $150 award, except with a bigger image.

STRETCH GOALS

At $15,000 the omnibus will become a hardcover.

At $20,000 the omnibus will have embossing and a full-color dust jacket.

Beyond that? Maybe a price reduction. Maybe I'll just make a hat out of money. I'm not going to add in shirts, posters, stickers, or other stuff; I really want to keep this simple so I can get to drawing the next comic as soon as possible!

Risks and challenges

The first one went off without a hitch aside from me taking forever to deliver signed copies because I set the price for drawing in them way too low. I didn't do that again.

The second one was delayed by a mistake I made in assembling the book, which I kept my backers updated on, and covered fixing with my own funds. I also did my best to alter all my prepress processes to avoid making that mistake again.

This time I plan to use Amazon Fulfillment to get most of the books to you. There may be exciting new mistakes to make in the production and shipping process of this book. I won't know until I make them; if I do, I'll keep you updated.

I didn't deliver either volume 1 or 2 when I initially promised I would, but they both got to their backers a lot sooner than some of the other graphic novels I'd backed around the same time. I'm probably still being overly optimistic in my delivery dates here.

Also I am just one woman who is not backed up. Yet. If I suddenly die, sorry. I'm not planning on it happening any time soon but I'm not getting any younger here.

Finally, in the event that this reality is actually a simulation that we all get unplugged from between the end of the Kickstarter and me pretending to ship all these imaginary books to you, your money will likely be as imaginary as my source files. If my source files are still accessible and "comic books" are at all a thing that is at all relevant in whatever's outside this reality, I'll do my best to hook you up with something but no promises, okay?